A Sputnik corresponded visited Syria's Daraa and met with former head of the White Helmets organization in the city Hassan Faruk Mohammed and his colleagues who spoke about their work experience.
DARAA (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 22nd October, 2018) A Sputnik corresponded visited Syria's Daraa and met with former head of the White Helmets organization in the city Hassan Faruk Mohammed and his colleagues who spoke about their work experience.
Over the last seven years, the headquarters of "civil defense," or the White Helmets, were located in a former police building near the Omari mosque in southern Daraa. The city is the birthplace of anti-government protests that led to the civil war.
The building which hosted the White Helmets headquarters is now controlled by the government and flies the Syrian flag.
Thanks to Russia's military diplomacy some of Syrian armed opposition groups agreed to conclude a ceasefire with the government after seven years of conflict.
Militants of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) are still present in the old section of Daraa and are allowed to carry small arms to maintain order.
A Syrian army roadblock stands at the entrance of the old section of Daraa. FSA militants, who joined the ceasefire, are stationed 200 meters from the roadblock. Their leader Abu Sharif is short-spoken, looks rather distrustful and has shrapnel wounds on his legs. He took the Sputnik correspondent to his half-renovated house.
"How can I help you and what do you want?" Sharif asked.
After being told about a wish to meet with White Helmets, he asks to follow him.
"We are revolutionaries and accepted the reconciliation with the government for peace. We are no Jabhat al-Nusra or the Islamic State (IS, terrorists groups banned in Russia), they are terrorists. So relax, I will take to police, and they will show you everything," Sharif said.
'CIVIL DEFENSE' AND WHITE HELMETS
At police station, the correspondent met with former White Helmets member Hassan Faruk Mohammed.
"I would like you to send a message ... White Helmets is a politicized organization and has nothing to do with neutrality. They were fulfilling the tasks they received and then ditched us," Faruk said.
According to him, under the pretext of good intentions, the members of White Helmets took control of all "civil defense" units operating on Syrian territories controlled by militants.
Faruk said that the leadership of the organization sat in Syria's Idlib and Turkey. "Civil defense" units also received financing to buy necessary equipment. In Daraa, the equipment was bought in Jordan.
"It has nothing to do with the humanitarian assistance ... Smugglers in Jordan were buying equipment and selling it to us for a bigger price doing business. The leadership of White Helmets fulfilled its political agenda and discarded us," Faruk stressed.
Daraa had a group of rescue volunteers before White Helmets came to the city.
"The fact that we are here after the reconciliation ... proves that we were honestly carried out our duties and have no reason to fear prison or persecution," one of Faruk's colleagues noted.
In late July, over 400 White Helmets activists and their family members were evacuated from southern Syria through Israel and Jordan at the request of the United States and several European countries.
Faruk said that only four of his people had left the country seeking a better life, others were from neighboring Quneitra province. It becomes clear from short answers of Faruk and his colleagues that all the evacuees were Syrian nationals who supposedly feared persecution by the Syrian authorities.
"We were supposed to be the basis for building new Syria. We helped and are ready to help all Syrian people. But White Helmets had a negative impact on the reputation of "civil defense" as they were carrying out their tasks under guise of volunteers," Faruk pointed out.
Faruk and his colleagues did not tell the Sputnik correspondent why Europe and the United States did not take in White Helmets activists from other Syrian provinces.
Later, an interlocutor in the section of Daraa free from militants suggested that activists who were evacuated through Israel were working with Western intelligence agencies and had information about the filming of staged chemical attacks in Syria, and that their evacuation was part of a reward for accomplished political order.
